This book was without a doubt one of the most gut-wrenching books I have ever read, only comparable to the books I have read about the African massacres and wars there. It was so hard to get through, but I knew that I needed to see how Schindler helped the Jewish people in the end.
One of the most interesting parts of this book is at the beginning, when the author says to not believe that Schindler was a hero, that he had his own flaws. He smoked and drank excessively, he was a member of the Nazi party to begin with, and had many affairs without even attempting to hide it from his wife. His wife (whom he never divorced) said that he had never been exceptional before the war, and was never exceptional afterwards. He was just lucky enough to have found his passion at the right time.
Oskar Schindler was a successful businessman who had ties to the higher-ups in the Nazi party when WWII started in Poland. He employed many Jewish people in his factories, which produced enamelware and ammunition. He was a man who knew how to get what he wanted, and was generous in his gifts to corruptible officials. He was a witness to the building of the ghetto in Cracow, and watched as it was emptied in a horrifically brutal manner with the inhabitants being taken to a concentration camp a few miles away. Out of all of the book, this part was the hardest to read. I even started reading a section and had to cover it with my hand because it was just too gruesome. Seeing this solidified Schindler's resolve to fight the Nazi system and to help as many Jewish people as he could.
Schindler, at great cost to him (he was eventually ruined by this), kept his Jewish staff with him and even allowed them to live in a mini camp on factory grounds. He gave them much more substantial rations at his own personal cost, did not allow the SS guards inside his camp, and even had hygiene facilities. They were still worked hard in the factory, but they did not live in the same fear as the people in the other camp.
Eventually they closed down that camp and moved them to the extermination camps of Auschwitz and Grosse-Rose, but Schindler made a deal with the government that if he had a list of people who he needed for his factory, and if he moved his factory to a different part of the country, then those people would be saved. Overall about 1,200 names were put on the list. The men arrived within a week or so, but the women didn't arrive until Schindler came out to rescue them from Auschwitz himself.
Once the war was over, he and his wife had to become refugees. The Russians would shoot any German citizen on sight. But thanks to his life-giving efforts, he was protected by Jewish people all the way to South America, where he worked as a farmer before coming back to Germany. He was broke, and relied on the kindness of the Schindlerjuden, or Schindler's Jews, to survive. When he died, he was allowed to be buried in Jerusalem as per his last wish. It said he was mourned on every continent.
Ok, now that you have the synopsis of the story. This book was more eye opening to the horrors of the Holocaust than any other single book I have ever read. I know of the awful things that have happened in the extermination camps, but I had no idea just how terrible it was in the Polish ghettos. I also was ignorant of the fact that in a lot of the concentration camps, it was a labor camp. I don't know what I thought they did there from day to day, but building things did not cross my mind. It just boggles my mind that people could become so depraved that they literally do not see another human being as a human. If they did, they wouldn't shoot them on the spot or make them stand naked in the freezing cold or let them pass lice to each other or SO many other things I read. It is degrading. It is really amazing that people survived this, because I feel like if you were to break someone's spirit in that way it would be hard to bounce back from that. It is also awful to think that we had our own internment camps in the United States, with the Japanese. While they were not as awful, it is still something that the country should be ashamed of.
It is important that books like these are kept out in circulation, so that people read them in the future when there are no more alive that remember World War II. We need to remember just how terrible this time was so that it isn't repeated. I think of how some politicians have spoken of a registration system for the Muslims in the United States. That is how this started!
I will say this- I had always thought it would be a horrible but thought-provoking experience to go visit Auschwitz. Now I am not so sure if I could stomach it. It is one thing to read about the horrors that went on there. But it is another to see the places where it actually happened.
No comments:
Post a Comment